A New Dynamical Method for Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on Optimal Regulation of Resonant Behaviors in a Fluctuating-Mass-Induced Linear Oscillator

Stochastic resonance (SR), a typical randomness-assisted signal processing method, has been extensively studied in bearing fault diagnosis to enhance the feature of periodic signal. In this study, we cast off the basic constraint of nonlinearity, extend it to a new type of generalized SR (GSR) in linear Langevin system, and propose the fluctuating-mass induced linear oscillator (FMLO). Then, by generalized scale transformation (GST), it is improved to be more suitable for exacting high-frequency fault features. Moreover, by analyzing the system stationary response, we find that the synergy of the linear system, internal random regulation and external excitement can conduct a rich variety of non-monotonic behaviors, such as bona-fide SR, conventional SR, GSR, and stochastic inhibition (SI). Based on the numerical implementation, it is found that these behaviors play an important role in adaptively optimizing system parameters to maximally improve the performance and identification ability of weak high-frequency signal in strong background noise. Finally, the experimental data are further performed to verify the effectiveness and superiority in comparison with traditional dynamical methods. The results show that the proposed GST-FMLO system performs the best in the bearing fault diagnoses of inner race, outer race and rolling element. Particularly, by amplifying the characteristic harmonics, the low harmonics become extremely weak compared to the characteristic. Additionally, the efficiency is increased by more than 5 times, which is significantly better than the nonlinear dynamical methods, and has the great potential for online fault diagnosis.